The Last Place

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Thanks to the stalwarts (Joan Jacobson, Vicky Bijur, Carrie Feron) and some new technical advisers-particularly Dr. Mark S. Komrad, Heather Dewar, and Tom Horton. I could not have written this book without the guidance of Tom’s An Island Out of Time, which helped me create the mythical island that appears here. It should be noted that Father Andrew White is a real person and he did keep journals on his trip to the New World, but he never described Notting Island, for it exists only in my imagination. This is a work of fiction.

This book was written during what proved to be my final year at the Baltimore Sun, and I want to include here the dedication that Rafael Alvarez was not allowed to use in Storyteller, a collection of his newspaper pieces published by the Sun in 2001: Thank you to the Washington-Baltimore Newspaper Guild for allowing Rafael, me, and thousands of other workers-past, present, and future-to earn a living wage.